The Best Media in Life is Free

ADMIN: Blog is moving!

2008-10-16T00:01:00.003-04:00

Please adjust your bookmarks. This blog is moving here:

E-Finds: Books, Music, Video & Other On-Line Finds

There will be expanded content, including e-book reviews and coverage of video, websites, blogs and all things e-book, free and otherwise. You can use tags to keep track of the topics which interest you. I hope you'll join me!

MISC: iPod Touch Software Round-up

2008-09-21T22:50:00.003-04:00

I just got an iPod Touch and have spent the ast few days playing around with the app store options. Some good freebies:

Zenbe: Keep lists of various types, and sync them with the free website. Very handy! I have put in some lists of my favourite meals so that I can plan my grocery shopping on the go.

Stanza and eReader: Good for reading on the go. Stanza is like a library-n-your-hands of free books: just browse the catalogue, pick the ones you want, and download for free. eReader syncs up with fictionwise.com or ereader.com if you have accounts there---just sign in and download books you may have purchased. You can also read freebies from sites like manybooks.net.

Facebook and Wikipanion: Some good web apps on the go, if you are into those sorts of things :)

Sol Free and Moonlight Lite: Solitaire and Mahjong games, respectively. Sol Free has five games and Moonligt is the best of the freebie versions I've tried, with the most configurable options.

So, what did I pay for? There were a few apps I wanted. I think I am done with the buying for now though :) I got an Interval Timer program for the gym (it beeps over your music!), a budget program called Spend (there is a light version available if you want to try it out. I sprung the low price for the full version because I wanted to track by month instead of by week) and a handful of games (Scrabble, which I buy for every platform I use, and two inexpensive clones of Text Twist and Bookworm).

I feel like I am set for now :) Leave me a comment if you feel there is a super iPhone/Touch app I've missed...

MUSIC: Instrumentals for Slide Shows

2008-06-26T10:52:00.003-04:00

I am doing a movie slide show project with some kids at summer camp this year, and they needed some background music to use for their movies. CC-Mixter to the rescue! Found some great instrumental music for the kids to play around with...

Ode to Joy by Pitx
Halehop by Pitx
Robochimp by Duckett
Inspiration by Acradian Burn
Airport Piano a Little Dirty by Kaer Trouz
NH Mandolin by Admiralbob77
Barcelona Mundo by pingnews
Harmonica, 90 BPM by subdues2
Oboe Two Kenobi by Puie
Carrie Freyday (Orchestra Snippet) by ringman

MOVIE: Big Buck Bunny

2008-06-07T10:47:00.002-04:00

From Boing Boing:

"Mike sez, "To show off the open-source animation program Blender, a small team just finished a great ten-minute cartoon, 'Big Buck Bunny.' They were funded by foundation support and pre-orders of the DVD by the Blender community. What's more, the whole thing is Creative Commons-licensed, and all the files for the animation are available."

I watched it just now and it's a very nicely done little production. Now that summer is upon us and I'll have some holiday time, expect to see more regular blog posts from me about this sort of thing. There are a ton of pub domain movies in archive.org that I haven't touched yet.

E-BOOK: Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

2008-05-14T00:21:00.002-04:00

Cory Doctorow has a new young adult novel out, and it's pretty good. As usual, he's got a Commons-licensed e-version available.

As to the story...I don't want to give it away. I enjoyed it. I thought it was quite creative, and the hacker stuff was fun. But at times, it was a little too exposition-y for my tastes---the story would pause while the character would educate us on wi-fi, or Linux, or rfids or whatever it was. I know that his goal of educating his target audience on tech empowerment is a noble one, but it's so obvious that it takes away from the story a little. It reminded me of this episode I once saw of tween drama 'Degrassi' where the character goes to a party, experiments with a tiny bit of drugs, and disaster ensues. There is this moment at the end where she is confronted by her friends, looks directly into the camera and says something like 'I realize now that drugs are bad and it was wrong of me to try them.' Noble message, okay. But it smacked a little too much of 'now, the grown-ups will tell you what to do.' That may be educational, but it isn't 'literature.' It's a good story, and for the most part I think it succeeds as what it is. But it as not eclipsed Douglas Coupland's 'Microserfs' as my favourite 'coming of age, techie style' story.

MUSIC: New albums by Josh Woodward

2008-04-26T23:46:00.001-04:00

The ever-reliable Josh Woodward has two new albums available for free download. Rock on.

MUSIC: Songs by Allison Crowe

2008-03-12T01:31:00.002-04:00

I am back on Jamendo trolling for some new tunes for my swanky new video ipod, so expect to see some more music posts from me in the coming weeks. My first find was this wonderful album from Allison Crowe---kind of twangy folk-pop stuff (you know I like the pop!) and quite a decent find. If you liked my previous posts on Deborah Dalton and Jenny Gillespie, you'll like this girl.

VIDEO: Story of Stuff

2008-03-01T20:26:00.002-05:00

This 20-minute documentary asks some thought-provoking questions on 'stuff.' The documentary is available for free download under a Creative Commons license. According to their website, over a million people have already watched.

EBOOK: Free French Textbook

2008-02-15T12:51:00.003-05:00

Liberte is a complete and very polished-looking introductory French texbook by Gretchen Angelo. It is available under a Creative Commons license for free download---only as a PDF, unfortunately, but hey, it's a start :) Looks like a great resource!

E-BOOK: City at World's End by Edmond Hamilton

2008-02-04T20:21:00.000-05:00

City at World's End is a quick, fun read from the 1950's. A small midwestern town gets accidentally catapulted through time to millions of years in the future, where the Earth is a dying, deserted world. The story follows them trying to rebuild their lives and survive what's happened to them. There are some definite 'product of its time' moments in there, especially as regards the characterization of some of the female characters, but all in all, it's a fun story and an easy one to get lost in. Enjoy!

E-BOOK: Award-Winning Books On-Line

2008-01-17T08:36:00.000-05:00

This page has a list of links to available on-line versions of works by Newberry and Nobel prize winners.

INFO: Celebrity Money Habits

2008-01-11T00:06:00.001-05:00

Bankrate.com has a great regular feature called Celebrity Fame and Fortune wherein they interview famous people about their money habits. They have an extensive archive of past interviews from celebrities such as Howie Mandel, Carrie Ann Inaba from Dancing with the Stars, Peter Frampton, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Barbara Taylor Bradford and dozens more. They are a great read! Check them out here.

ADMIN: Bookmarks Update

2007-12-26T01:23:00.001-05:00

I'm phasing out the webpage with the blog post index and music index and all of that. Too cumbersome to maintain, and I have been feeling guilty for falling behind. The new thing, simpler, better, is del.icio.us. I have set up a thing there for all my fun free media stuff. Just use E-BOOKS or MUSIC as your starting point and clock away to browse by all music, all books, or any of the sub-categories which come up: tagging makes it easy. Books which are also mysteries? Songs which are also instrumental and come from Magnatune? Click away.

No more 'jot on paper, add to webpage, upload webpage' and all that nonsense. No more keeping straight the music page and the book page and the whatever page. Now, I can just click right from my browser, add it to the collection, and away we go. And all you tag fans will find it very easy to filter the content which most interests you. See? Everyone wins.

Media Booksmarks at Del.icio.us

MUSIC: Songs by Richard Savino

2007-12-14T11:39:00.000-05:00

Found a great instrumental cd on Magnatune while doing some research on holiday songs for my French classes. I am normally not an 'ambient' type of music fan. When I do go for this sort of thing, it's usually fast-paced stuff like fiddle tunes. This is multi-instrument, but very much in that style. If you enjoyed my earlier post on the Dongas Tribe, you'll like this one!

Richard Savino, Murcia: Danza y Diferencias

Check out the first track. It's rockin'

E-BOOK: The Mouse in the Mountain by Norbert Davis

2007-11-30T20:05:00.000-05:00

Since the demise of Black Mask, an on-line pulp fiction site, Manybooks.net seems to be picking up the slack and is sporting a growing pulp section. They have been featuring more of these titles on the homepage, and it's there I found The Mouse in the Mountain and was introduced to Doan and Carstairs. I found this introduction to the works of Norbert Davis which gives some valuable context into the pulp fiction market at the time (warning: sad ending!) It's too bad he wasn't born fifty years later, because hard-boiled humour in in these days. Doan is an affable is fairly laid back PI, and his partner, Carstairs, is a judgmental, irascible, pony-sized dog. Carstairs is right up there with the best animal companions in fiction, and his scenes are amusing. The memorable bits in this first installment involve Doan playing director to Carstairs to help a father control his unruly son.

The plot, such as it is, involves a bus trip in Mexico that ends in murder. There are some fairly stereotypical heiresses, colourful locals, obnoxious Americans and such, but the real star is Doan and his companion. Additionally, there is a bus driver who speaks delightful "school" English (correctly but in an over-the-top fashion) who steals his scenes, and the occasional period glimpses (Carstairs helps train army dogs for the 'war effort') add colour and character. I suppose the one drawback would be that mystery fans these days expect to be able to solve the case along with the detective. The ending, when it does come, comes out of nowhere in the "Actually, it was Professor Plumb! In the Library! With a candlestick!" type of vein.

I did love the dog though. The three novels in this series are definitely worth a read.

MISC: My Freeware Palm Device

2007-11-28T13:02:00.001-05:00

I recently bought a used Alphasmart Dana on ebay, and have started playing around with freeware Palm applications. The main mecca on-line seems to be Freeware Palm, and most of the goodies I found were from that site. So, what have I been using? Program-wise, these are my pics:

dsScribbler (for freehand sketches/notes when needed)
Exercise (a rep timer/counter for the gym)
Metro (a subway map, info available for many cities)

And for games:

Blackjack (very basic version)
Checkers (still looking for a good version, the on I found is a little slow)
Gin Rummy (a wonderful implementation of te card game classic)
Grouper (quick-playing puzzle game)
Hearts (a very basic but serviceable implementation of another classic)
Marbles2 (like SameGame, this was the best version I found for BW screens)
Patience (many solitaire games in a collection)
Rally100 (Fun card game)
Star Mahjong (Rules not explained well on site, but a fun game once I figured it out)
Vexed (puzzle game, a bit frustrating sometimes!)
Word Wiggle (Boggle clone)

If you are interested in reading my review of the Dana, check out the Teleread Blog, where I have just started contributing. And leave me a comment if you think of any can't-miss Palm freeware I haven't mentioned!

RECIPE: Five Great Lunchbox Favs

2007-11-18T13:34:00.000-05:00

I ave begun posting some of my favourite recipes to Recipe Zaar, a popular recipe sharing website. You can add your own recipes, browse and save other people's recipes, search and filter the large database to your criteria and in general just pick up new cooking ideas. It's my favourite of the recipe sharing websites, and I have found many neat recipes in its depths.

It does have its limitations. Advanced features such as multiple cookbooks come with a fee, the forum is not as active as I would like in the areas which interest me, and it takes only very specific recipe formats (so, many of my mix-and-match recipes would not be shareable). But it is overall a great cooking resource. I have shared about a dozen of my own most-used recipes, most of them lunch ones: I have food allergies, so packing my own lunch is necessary, and I like to take good food and make it feel special.

Here are my top five so far:

Red Lentil Thermos Soup: Grated vegetables add bulk, but minimal calories. Pre-grate the night before, and this soup can be ready to pack in your thermos within five minutes.

Couscous Onigiri: Do you like those fun shaped sushi balls, but lack the patience to make real sticky rice? Use couscous, and some cookie cutters, for the same effect.

Sweet Lunchbox Noodles: An easy dish to throw together with leftover spaghetti or fast-cooking ramen.

Choco-Nut Banana Spread: A cookbook find, suitable as a dip for fruit or crackers, or as a filling for a wrap or tortilla.

Single-Serve Cookies: Adapted from a cookbook called "Small-Batch Baking." Mine makes only two cookies (no tempting leftovers!) and uses only one bowl and 2 spoons.

PODCAST: Quirks and Quarks

2007-11-15T08:51:00.000-05:00

Quirks and Quarks is a a weekly science show appearing on CBC Radio. It is concise, well-produced and very accessible to the average listener. It has long been one of my favourite podcasts, and there is an extensive downloadable archive of past shows available at their website. I highly recommend this one!

Here are some of my favourite past episodes:

The Perils of Preemies

Exorcizing Myths About Exercise

Milking the Benefits

The Autism Diaries

The Decline of the Autopsy

The Placebo Effect

Cure for Aging

Documenting the Dinosaur’s Demise

The Science of Dreaming

Why Athletes Choke

Recipe for a Mummy

Melting the Iceman

Chris Craft: My Life in Mission Control

The Red-Headed Gene

The Return of Thalidomide

The Limits to a Longer Life

ADMIN: Exciting announcement!

2007-11-15T08:42:00.000-05:00

Hi everyone! Sorry again for the long hiatus. I had to move very suddenly, and between that asnd the start of Nanowrimo, it threw me a little. Anyway, I have some exciting news for you. This blog will be expanding its scope a little in the coming weeks. I continue to find great Creative Commons and public domain materials on the net, and will post those as I find them. But there is a ton of other great, and free, information available out there on social sharing sites and other public platforms. A number of you also said you wanted more editorial-type content from me. So, the blog will be expanding it's coverage to include not just the CC-and-free, but the cool-and-free as well: podcasts, cool websites, interesting blogs and items from social sharing sites on a variety of topics, such as youtube (video), recipezaar (recipes) and scribd (documents).

All psts will be tagged, as they are now, so you can quickly and easily filter the posts and find the material you are looking for. As always, I take suggestions for links and items worth posting, or blog carnivals and/or commuties I should get involved with. Ready for some great freebies? Stay tuned for my first podcast post...

MISC: My Open-Source Mac, Part 2

2007-10-08T13:24:00.000-04:00

To finish up my mac posts, the non-necessary but still fun stuff :) All of these are available for Unix and PC platforms too...

Tux Paint: Similar to Kid Pix. A fun little art program with sound effects, colouring pages, stamping tools etc. Extensible via add-ons---drop in your own stamp sets and starter pages, or download off the net from a growing user community.

Tux Racer: The most fun, bizarre little game ever. It's a racing game where Tux the Penguin basically slides down giant ice mountains on his tummy trying to collect little fish. Great graphics, fun and simple gameplay.

Enigma: A puzzle game. You roll this marble around trying to hit pairs of coloured bricks. Many, many levels are included, and more can be easily added. Beautiful graphics and some interesting game options.

MISC: My Open-Source Mac

2007-10-06T22:28:00.000-04:00

My last computer post for awhile, I promise :) Anyway, a quick round-up of the freeware/open source stuff I have installed on my shiny new Macbook :)

NeoOffice: An essential, imho. Runs pretty speedily for me, but my machine is brand-new, so perhaps that's a factor. Works well with my Word docs, and is handling basic page layout stuff without a problem. I wish you could directly launch a new spreadsheet from an icon though---the different modules do not have separate icons, and if you want to do anything but word process, you have to either open an existing file, or open a new document once the program (i.e. the Writer module) starts up.
Kompozer: A webpage editor similar to Dreamweaver or Front Page. I have not figured out how to use the site manager yet---I edit my few websites off-line and then transfer them manually, and I think the site manager is designed to let you edit pages directly on the web. Still, this is a very fully-featured and easy to use program. Open source really is a miracle of the modern age, that you can equip an entire computer for free like this :)
Page Packer: Make pocket-sized mini folded booklets using this really neat little app. You select from over 50 templates (calendar, address book, notepaper etc) and drag them onto a grid. It prints out your page, and you follow their guide to get it folded. You can also put your own documents (in PDF form) or images onto one of your mini-pages. I can see so many uses for this thing! Great little program.

MISC: Open-Source Software for Mac

2007-09-29T16:33:00.001-04:00

In honor of my shiny new Macbook, some open-source apps for the Mac. I am running smooth as can be with Firefox and NeoOffice, but am still looking for Mac replacements for MS Publisher (I make a lot of booklets for teaching) and Front Page. I suspect I might be able to tinker with Neo Office to get the job done, but there has to be a more elegant way...

EBOOK: Overclocked by Cory Doctorow

2007-09-24T21:56:00.000-04:00

I have blogged about Cory Doctorow before, and was delighted to find his latest short story collection in print recently. It was a worthy buy. If you want to check it out, he has done his usual e-release on-line under a Creative Commons license, and you can download it in a variety of formats thanks to ManyBooks.net.

I found myself disagreeing with many of the Amazon.com reviews. I found the generally panned "I, Row-Boat" to be a charming and original idea, reminiscent of "Someone Comes to Town. Someone Leaves Town." It took me awhile to catch on to the concept of the concept of how humans work in the tale (and I do have a few questions, such as propagation of the species under such a model, which go unanswered). But I loved the idea that inanimate objects could develop consciousness, and there were two lines in particular (among them, the final of the story) that made it completely work for me.

Most of the Amazon reviewers in contrast loved "After the Siege" and I confess, I didn't get it. At all. The writing was vivid and lovely, but the concept never quite gelled in my mind, and I just didn't get it. Can't win 'em all, I guess :)

Anyway, it's a great little collection. If you do enjoy it, I humbly suggest you pick up the print version and show authors like this that Commons distribution works.

REVIEW: Open Office Revisited

2007-09-23T13:11:00.000-04:00

I just bought a shiny new macbook, and after some rather clunky experimentation with the demo version of iWork it came with, I downloaded NeoOffice. And...so far, so good :) It seems a little more stable than Open Office was on a PC, and so far, I am enjoying it.

I think the problem I had on my PC was that I kept trying to run Office too, and the import capabilities bugged me a little. On this Mac, I do not have MS Office and am only using NeoOffice. So, no worrying about the imports :) The rare time I need to share files with my computer at work, it's mostly text-based anyway, and even Open Office on a PC never had problems with that.

Granted, the transition has not been perfect. Any file involving tables imported a little oddly, and most of these will need to be fixed at some point. But this was a good lesson to me in being realistic. Is it a problem if complex graphical layouts do not transfer perfectly between MS Office and Open Office? In theory, yes. But how often will I really want to do that? The last time I made a file with any sort of graphic, it was a birthday card, and I printed it on the spot, at home, and never even saved the file. 99% of the time, I work with plain text, and the 1% of the time I use graphics, I do it on personal stuff that doesn't really need sharing.

I'm sure the file import/export features are among the top priorities for ongoing tweaking, and the problem will fix itself over time. So, I'm not worried. It'll get fixed. For now, I just have to handle the graphics-heavy stuff at home, I guess, and accept that my tables will have to be tweaked a bit. On the plus, NeoOffice on a Mac seems much more stable then Open Office did on a PC. No crashes yet! And a fairly good user experience, too. A few of the preferences still seem a little clunky to access (there has to be an easier way to add to the Gallery!) But overall, I am happy and I think I will enjoy using NeoOffice on my shiny new toy :)

MUSIC: More from Josh Woodward

2007-09-09T12:17:00.001-04:00

As a follow-up to my previous Josh Woodward post, I will be blogging the best of his two new albums. First up is 'Not Quite Connected.' My top picks:

Josh has both cd's available for free download by track or as a whole album zip file, and if you like the music, you can buy the album for the price of your choosing.

Each song has a helpful descriptive tag giving a suggested genre. I found these helpful. If you find a song you like, you can look for similar styles of song by matching the genre tag.

One tip for navigating his site, if you click on a song title, it will take you to a lyrics page where you can preview the song without leaving the page and then choose to download it.

Enjoy! And if you do like the album, support Woodward's alternative distribution methods by buying the CD. I bought his last one and really enjoy it. This is fun rock-acoustic stuff that's very radio-friendly.

EBOOK: Roughing it in the Bush by Susanna Moodie

2007-09-05T06:27:00.000-04:00

In honour of the new school year, a Canadian historical classic for you to enjoy: Roughing it in the Bush by Susanna Moodie. Moodie was a Brit who came to Canada in its very earliest days and wrote a "Little House on the Prairie" type memoir about her life in pioneer Canada. Her sister, also a writer, wrote a similar account. These books are interesting glimpses into life in an earlier time. Enjoy!

MUSIC: New Albums from Josh Woodward

2007-09-03T23:44:00.001-04:00

Now that the school year is beginning again, I have a new job, and will be at last getting into a sensible routine again. so you can expect a lot more frequent posts from me. I will be trialling a theme system for the month to keep things regular. So, Monday is Music Day, and here is some new stuff from the excellent Josh Woodward. He's got two new albums up on his website for free download, and while I have not had a chance to give them all a listen yet, I did check out the freebie track "Letting Go" on his homepage, and it was excellent. He's nice and poppy, for those who like that sort of thing.

MUSIC: Music by Sidearm

2007-08-26T01:08:00.000-04:00

At last, some new music :) I know, I was getting into an ebook thing there for awhile. Well, here is a great new album for you from the Internet Archive. Very indie-rock, some cool songs. Unfortunately, there is only one file resolution available, and it's huge. But the Internet Archive lets you listen on-site so you can try it out first.

Don't Cry Help Until You're Dead, Sidearm

OTHER: 101 Things in 1001 Days

2007-08-15T14:38:00.000-04:00

The 101 Things in 1001 Days Project is a rapidly spreading internet meme wherein one chooses 101 things to do, and resolves to do them in the next 1001 days. The 'things' range from financial and social goals to lists of things to read, learn, do, see or buy. Some are tiny things, some are more involved, and most lists posted to the project's website thus far are a mix of both.

I just love Massive Internet Projects of this sort, Nanowrimo and Script Frenzy and all that good stuff. This is right up my alley, and I've posted my list here for reference. You may notice that several of the items on it relate to this blog: learn to re-mix music and post it on cc-mixter, post 100 more Creative Commons songs to the blog and watch 100 classic movies from the Internet Archive Feature Films Collection.

Most of my other goals are of the more personal sort, but should you wish to follow my progress, I humbly refer you to my Live Journal, where I'll be blogging my progress. Wanna join me? Post your 101 things somewhere, then leave me a link in the comments.

OTHER: Make Your Own Notebook

2007-08-09T14:21:00.000-04:00

I have a new mini-brochure up at Scribd. It's about how to make your own refillable mini-notebook using the notebook size of your choose, a hole punch and a plastic duotang. DIY all the way!

EBOOK: Short Stories from Strange Horizons

2007-08-01T21:08:00.000-04:00

On-line sci-fi magazine Strange Horizons has been offering authors the option of making their web-archived work available under a Creative Commons license. The editor has made lists of these stories available here and here. Enjoy!

EBOOK: Project Gutenberg Canada

2007-07-21T10:37:00.000-04:00

First, there was Project Gutenberg. Then, there was Project Gutenberg Australia. And now: Project Gutenberg Canada. How exciting! In addition to showcasing Canadian content already available via the other Gutenberg projects, Gutenberg Canada will offer a safehaven for works which may not yet be public domain in the US and Australia. America has quite restrictive public domain laws, and Australia recently extended their "life plus 50 years" standard to "life plus 75." So, three cheers for Canada, the sole remaining on-line bastion of Life Plus 50 :)

EBOOK: My Project Gutenberg Reading List

2007-07-20T08:02:00.000-04:00

I've begun compiling a list of essential reads from Project Gutenberg. I know that the huge size of their catalogue can be a little daunting. Lately, they have added some browsing features such as the Bookshelf, but it's still a lot to wade through.

My list details the books I want to read in each category. I'm sure there are omissions---I am not an expert on every genre of fiction. But at almost 500 titles, sorted into handy categories such as mystery, short story and children's literature, I suppose it is as good a starting point as any.

I have highlighted in red the titles I have read so far. If you download the list for your own use, you may feel free to remove that formatting and do your own thing with it. I put the list together mostly to aid my own future reading, but it is a fairly good list, I think, so I am putting it out there. If you want a starting point with Gutenberg, feel free to share, borrow, copy, use or modify my list to your liking.

The List

SOFTWARE: Tiddly Wiki

2007-07-15T16:04:00.000-04:00

I have not been able to get on-line all week! Stupid computer. Anyway, all fixed now, I think, and I wanted to share with you my new favourite thing: Tiddly Wiki. I have been looking for a good recipe management solution, and think this may be the answer. It saves all your work in a single web file, so it's cross-platform and portable. It's basically a free-form wiki-based cardfile. Each 'tiddler' has a title, text box and tag field. You can use it to sort any sort of information you want, search or browse your entriees by tag, easily print by pasting your text into your favourite editor and customize the whole shebang to your specifications. Best of all, each of your wiki files can be edited and viewed off-line, using any computer with a capable web browser.

I am loving this idea. The main drawback to conventional recipe software for me was the time involved in putting each recipe element into its own little special field. I wanted to be able to just find a recipe on-line, copy it, paste it in and go. I wanted something cross-platform too: my next computer may be mac or linux. I was having some success storing things in del.icio.us (I have just discovered tags, and I love them!) but saw the limitations in that when my net access was down these last few days and I couldn't get into anything. Tiddly Wiki seems to provide the best of all worlds. And you can download as many blank ones as you want, for storing and/or sharing any sort of information you want!

I plan to set up my recipe file over the next few days. I'll let you know how it goes.

ADMIN: Website Update

2007-07-04T01:06:00.001-04:00

I have updated the website index with the posts from June.

Index of all blog posts
Index of just the music

There are some other goodies on the webpage too if you go exploring :) For example, almost two dozen free audio workouts are listed here, and over one hundred lunchbox recipes can be found here. Stay tuned for an announcement regarding my ebook index too!

MUSIC: A New Find from Garage Band

2007-06-29T12:00:00.000-04:00

Found this electro-pop tune from one of my favourite music sites, Garage Band. I've found about 30 blog-worthy commons-licensed songs there. The site os going through some changes lately, and I know of at least one artist I have blogged about before who has pulled their stuff from the site. But there are some gems to be found there is one looks hard enough :) Thankfully, you have me to do it for you :)

Timothy P, Shattered Boxes

WEBSITE: Open Educational Resources

2007-06-27T11:36:00.000-04:00

The Open Educational Resources Commons Search has a large variety of educational materials, searchable by subject or grade level. Items available include podcast lectures, lesson plans, on-line courses, lecture transcripts and basically anything useful. The site has a slick interface, a handy tagging system and advanced search options.

WEBSITE: New Feature from Project Gutenberg

2007-06-21T18:55:00.000-04:00

Some over at Teleread alerted me to an interesting new feature over at Project Gutenberg. It's called the Bookshelf, and it's a wiki-esque collection of thematic lists for browsing. What makes it interesting is the inclusion on certain of the lists, when relevant, of works not in the database. It's handy when a series has multiple works of which only some are in the public domain: you can see at a glance which works are missing and you can make other arrangements to find them should you wish to. They also have links to Gutenberg of Australia when relevant, but they don't direct link to any titles there, only indicate that more works by that author are available for those who live in Life Plus 70 countries.

I am still waiting for an amazon.com-style browsing experience, with capsule summaries of every title, user-generated thematic lists and system-generated 'people who downloaded this book also downloaded' lists and user-editable wiki-style info for every title. Manybooks comes closer, but nobody has hit the need exactly. The growing database of public-domain etexts is a fabulous thing, but many people still need help in filtering it down a little when they browse. It's all well and good when you go in there knowing that you just want to download Wuthering Heights and be done with it. But if you just want to browse, I think the user experience out there in ebookland is still a little lacking.

MUSIC: Music by James Hurst

2007-06-20T22:14:00.000-04:00

I have been meaning to blog about this one for awhile :) It's an EP by James Hurst, rock-pop-type stuff with a little bit of flourish in places :) The title track, "Spread the News," was definitely the highlight for me. Download the whole album, or the tracks individually, at the artist's website or at Jamendo.

REVIEW: One Last Open Office Round-Up

2007-06-16T12:40:00.001-04:00

Firstly, my previous comments on Open Office:

Now, onto some final comments on my Great Open Office Experiment of 2007 :)

I made the decision last night to un-install Open Office. What happened? Well, to put it bluntly, I made the mistake of venturing outof the safety of Writer :) And? Both Calc and Impress crahsed my machine so many times that I could not imagine ever working with them in their current incarnations. And I found one more glitch in Writer that I couldn't live with. Some observations:

Calc was fine as long as I stayed away from the charts. Firstly, they did not import correctly when present on existing Excel spreadsheets. Secondly, they crashed the program when I tried to create them in Calc directly. I was not able to save any to see how Excel would read them. I do not use charts often. I have maybe one existing spreadsheet which has them. I really only use basic spreadsheet functions like sums and averages. But the crashing? Unacceptable. Even a basic user like me needs a little stability.

I have no major complaints with Impress as a 'user experience' type of thing, except that it crashed several times. The biggie for me was that after using it, I was not able to open or start any other Open Office application for some reason and had to restart my machine.

I discovered that Writer does not play nice with MS Word in regards to files containing graphics or layouts. Plain text shared back and forth just fine, but anything with graphics for mangled to bits when imported into Word, and remained that way when opened back up in Writer, even if I didn't save anything when in Word. Unacceptable!

Bottom line for me is, I am for the moment still on a Windows system, and Microsoft Office seems to be working for me there. Am I discounting Open Office completely? No. And honestly, I did like user experience in Writer quite a bit, and would be happy with Calc were it not for the above-mentioned issue. I just suspect that Open Office might be a little less glitchy in its native environment, on Linux. So I'll save my upgrade to it until I get to that point. And who knows, by then, they might be up to the next release, and some of my other complaints may be addressed by then :)

UPDATE: More on Open Office

2007-06-15T10:38:00.000-04:00

Now that I've been using Open Office for a couple of days, I have a few more comments on the user experience and about the quirks to this program which may take some getting used to for MS Office users :)

Even in its Windows version, this is very much a Linux-inspired program, so certain things like file names are set up a bit differently. Linux must dislike multi-word file names, because every bit associated with this program used the_underscore when naming files which are more than one word long. I wonder, if one changed them to Windows standard and then tried to migrate to Linux, if this would be a problem.

The Gallery is extremely non-intuitive to configure. As I said in my previous review, I do think most people don't really use clip art anymore. But just the same, a few little tweaks would make this neat little applet much more workable. I think it should operate as the templates do: those have a directory in your program files, and if I add a folder to it, for example, 'letters,' then 'letters' will show up in the program as one of my template choices, and anything added to that folder will automatically appear in the list. The Gallery, in contrast, requires you to set up a new 'theme' from within the program and then right-click to access a hidden menu which will allow you to add files. If you add files to the actual folder the new theme creates, they will not appear in the Gallery. Also, there were a few Gallery themes it came with which could not be deleted. I did finally realize that they could at least be renamed, so I renamed them to themes I had planned to add anyway and filled them with my own stuff. But again, this was needlessly clunky, and managing the whole thing using folders would ne so much easier.

Certain keys do not function the same way. For example, I could right-click while in the 'open files' dialog to delete a file, but I couldn't do that when in the 'open a template' dialog. And you can't use backpspace or delete to erase a table in your document---the only way to do that is via selecting the 'delete table' command from a menu. Also, I really miss the ability to customize toolbars via the right-click. In Open Office, you have to go through a menu command and then click on two buttons before it will let you get to that stage. I did finally get the job done, but again, needlessly clunky!

The page layout capabilities in Writer turned out to be, on experimentation, fairly robust. I was able to create multi-column layouts using both tables and frames, mix graphics with text and do simple and medium-complexity layouts. Handling text wrap was a little fiddly (the command to adjust the settings and margins on the wrap were a little more buried than I felt they should have been) and I spent several minutes trying in vain to select more than one picture object at once to group them. I finally opened up Draw and got it done quickly and easily, then pasted my grouped graphic back into Writer. I had been hoping to uninstall Draw as I don't think I would use it much, but I suppose I have to keep it around now :)

The context toolbars which popped up for various tasks were generally handy, but imho could be managed better. For example, a picture popped up TWO toolbars, one for 'picture' and one for 'frame.' A bit of screen clutter :) I would have rather had a fixed spot in the toolbar which would change depending on the context, as in the old Wordperfect version I once had. They had the two main toolbars, and then one underneath it whose contents would adjust depending on the context.

I am still not happy with the language handling. I really do miss the auto-detect on language that MS Word has, and I think it is a big problem that the spell-checker does not correct accent mistakes (i.e. if the word is missing an accent, but otherwise correct, it doesn't flag it). I miss being able to set my own keyboard shortcuts for accents (there is a macro for Open Office which claims to do this, but I could not get it working and it made the program crash) and I wish I could have shortcut buttons for specific characters and therefore bypass the giant, cluttered 'insert special character' thing.

There are not as many page view options available. Specifically, the 'normal' view in MS Word is not there. There is only 'print layout' and 'web layout.' I find the 'normal' view a bit less fatiguing on the eyes, but I am not sure its absence is a fatal flaw for me. MS Word does have other interesting layout options (the 'reading layout' which lets you read your document e-book style is kind of neat) and this might be an area for Open Office to expand on in the future. But as I said, not a fatal flaw.

Minor annoyances with a few program crashes when I tried to install a macro add-in, and apparently I will have to uninstall the whole thing and start again if I want to upgrade to a new version. But perhaps by the time the next version comes out, they will have a patch-based upgrader available, or at least, some way to preserve custom settings. One hopes that each upgrade will offer some sort of useful improvement...

Of the good: the program loads much faster than MS Office, thanks to the quick loader add-in. It does make the computer's start-up time a little slower, but that's a small price to pay. If I try and load Open Office the conventional way (using a desktop shortcut) its start-up is on par (or perhaps a tiny bit slower) than MS Office. But if I use the quick loader, it's almost instant. That's very nice. Also, I like the template handlinga lot better (and have actually installed more templates than I currently have in MS Word). I think they would benefit from a more centralized template library where users could easily contribute content. They do have a small template section on the Open Office home page, but the only wayto add to it is to email some guy. I don't think a slick, massive archive like the Microsoft one should necessarily be a development priority given other issues they are working on, but it can't be that hard to set up a template page on the main site with some sort of automated submission tool...

Of the good 2: Page layout is much easier in Open Office than in MS Word. Except for the graphics problem already mentioned, it was a much speedier and smoother process to lay out different elements on the page. I did at first miss the slickness of MS Publisher, but on the other hand, I have seen many a sign or poster in my day that was so obviously created that way thatt here is something to be said for doing it yourself and opting out of the homogenizing blandness. Still...MS Publisher's one-click simplicity to change the background or border or page size or whatever, is very handy. That's why perhaps Open Office might benefit from a more dedicated desktop publishing application.

Verdict: For me, Open Office can easily replace Powerpoint (which I hardly ever use) and Excel (although I do miss the tab colours a tiny bit). Quirks aside, I like working in Writer. It's more fun to fiddle with than MS Word, and a little more adjustable. But...I will probably keep MS Word around for my French work. I can live with the clunky customization, limited page view options and finicky right-click settings. They really are minor annoyances when compared with the ease of use overall, and the advantage Writer has as far as Gallry integration, page layout, speediness thanks to the quick launch, and general customization. But...the language handling is terrible. It's far too much effort to change back and forth, and the spell-check not flagging accent mistakes is inexcusable. So, for me, Open Office will not, for now, be the complete MS Office replacement I thought it would be. I'll use it, happily, for my more general needs. But I'll need to keep MS Word around for the time being.

AUDIOBOOK: Moby Dick by Herman Melville

2007-06-14T07:29:00.000-04:00

A classic, audio-book style, thanks to Librivox. Enjoy!

OTHER: Open Office Review

2007-06-12T20:27:00.000-04:00

OpenOffice.org is the official name of this well-known open source office suite. It is robust enough to give Microsoft Office a real run for its money, and will certainly more than meet the productivity needs of most users. I downloaded it yesterday, finally, after becoming disillusioned with the increasingly slow performance of MS Office on my aging laptop. Here are my comments:

1) The Good

This program is extremely similar to MS Office in look and feel. Transition was easy for me. A few of the commands are in different places, and while some of them took some hunting around, several others were in much more intiutive places.

I had absolutely no problems reading my existing MS Office files. I have heard that there can be some issues with extremely complex, formula-laden, footnote-containing hard-core files. But for the general spreadsheet and word processing I tend to need, no problems at all. I can't imagine anyone I know, aside from my very techie sister, having any files this will not read, or needing to create any this will not create.

I like the little clipart organizer. It is much faster to access than the MS Clipart Organizer, and it's easy to add your own items and have them be accessible. Once I figured out where it was storing things, I found it simple enough to go and add in my own pictures in a batch.

I like the way templates are handled. Again, once you figure out where it's storing them, it is quite easy to add new ones. I found many new ones on-line here and here and here (under the "extensions" section). And remember that Word and Excel documents can be read by it too, so you can download those and just save them in Open Office.
EDITED TO ADD: I tried this with a few Office Onlien templates, and many of them worked. A few did not: some of the margins did not line up, complex layouts appeared as pictures and not editable objects, and anything with wizard-like 'fields' in it didn't work. But many of the simpler things like lists or calendars worked wonderfully.

I like the open formats support. I was surprised to go into my Microsoft folder and find everything in a private format only Microsoft can read! None of that clipart can easily be imported into Open Office (although there are ways if you fiddle a little bit). Open Office in contrast has everything in formats other programs can read.
EDITED TO ADD: Microsoft clip art in photo format did import with no problems, and windows media files were useable too, but those had to be opened up in another program and then pasted in. An extra step, but if you really want a certain picture, you can have it.

2) The Less Good

The Gallery (clip art) is not searchable and does not have a tagging system. I tried to put everything into Picasa, but Picasa made duplicates and messed everything up. It took me some time to get everything right again. I am not sure this is a fatal flaw. I think most people these days do not rely on canned clip art anyway and if they need a graphic for a particular project, they will find it on Flickr or something. I suspect they intend the gallery to be used for frequently used items and not so much as a massive clipart repository. Still...a tag system and search feature wouldn't kill you, you guys :)

Menu and toolbar customization is a little bit clunky. It's there, but it takes quite a few steps. And once you add something, you can't take it off. You can de-select it, so it does not appear on the toolbar anymore. But it'll still be on the list when you go into the settings again. A little clunky, as I said :)
EDITED TO ADD: I stand corrected. You can remove list items with the delete key. I was confused because there was no button, and backspace had no effect. Further research revealed that Open Office treats backspace and delete keys a little differently :) I stand by my assertion that the customization is a little clunky, though :)

I did not find the language settings as useful to me as those in Word. I occasionally write in French, and am still looking for a program that will let me painlessly switch back and forth without going into the settings and changing the program preferences. Additionally, I did not find the spell check in French to be as good as that of MS Word. It did catch words which were outright spelled incorrectly, but it did not catch accent mistakes, and that's mostly what I use the French spell-check for in Word: to catch the accent and put it in for me when I am too lazy to access keyboard shortcuts and make one properly. Note to office suite developers: language should not be buried in program settings. One should be able to go back and forth with one menu command! This is the modern era and many people write in more than one language. I can want to write a document in French without wanting the whole program to BE French, you know? Oh, and there's no grammar checker. I don't care, but some people might.

Page layout tasks are a little clunky. I had no trouble getting pictures to wrap properly, but I could not get ruled borders to do so. And when I took the borders off my tables, it didn't leave any shadows or guidelines or whatever so I could see that they still were there. It's possible that with some fiddling, I could get these somehow. It just is not very intuitive to me as to how, and I think it is a common enough command that perhaps it should be.
EDITED TO ADD: Okay, I did the fiddling and I got all the wraps to work, and I got guides on the tables too. I stand by my assertion that it is not intuitive though:) And if the Draw program only had a proper handling of textboxes, suite could handle basic page layout...one can dream :)

Okay, this one is a bit petty and shallow, but...I miss being able to colour in the tabs on my spreadsheet files :) If this is do-able in Open Office, I don't see where or how. Again, this falls under intuitive commands. Maybe it's there and I just don't see it. Maybe it isn't there. But I can't find it at this point.

3) Wish List for the Future

I would not mind a basic Publisher-style program with a few pre-set templates or wizards for simple tasks like labels or greeting cards. I find the layout controls in Writer a little clunky, and I am not at all sure how Draw works. By "slide" does it mean "page" and are we meant to be using the Draw program for the type of basic page layout work I am talking about? I associate slides with the presentation program, so maybe the terminology is confusing me. But I want to be able to lay out text boxes, graphics etc on a page in a basic capacity. I played around a little with Draw and it will let me put these elements on a page, but it won't let me see the edges on them so I can do actual layout work.
EDITED TO ADD: All they need to do is have a 'show guides' option on the text fields in order to fix this, so I hope they consider adding this small fix. All I want to do is be able to lay out text and graphics together. They have a text function, but it'd a field and not a text box. You need to be able to see the borders. So, Office Editors, what do you think? Can we have proper text boxes in Draw?

I don't want a whole bloated Front Page-style app, but a few site management tools for those doing websites wouldn't hurt. Most of my web page work is just graphics, text and hyperlinks. But it would be nice to have a sorter or organizer for web site stuff built into the program somewhere.

As I said, better support for those doing multi-language work. Maybe a pop-up toolbar with common accented symbols on it so we don't need to pull up that huge special character window and hunt through it every time we want to do an accent? And a one-button "switch to my second language" command for swapping spell checks without having to go into the program settings?

4) Overall verdict

I am still playing with it. Right now, it is still a little slow for me because I'm not used to it and don't know where everything is. But performance-wise, it is comparable to MS Office, and I suspect that eventually, I will be fully changed over to it. If I was not so into the open source principle, would I go to the bother I have? To be honest, probably not until I had to. MS Office was working, and why rock the boat? On my next computer though, when I would have had to face buying something to run? Maybe I would have.

For the summer at least, I plan to keep at minimum MS Word still installed on my computer, so I can get continue to get templates from Office Online, and so I can work more easily with my French documents for the course I am taking right now. But I have faith that Open Office is the way to go long-term. They will keep improving it, and I will be there :)

MUSIC: Music by Ralph Buckley

2007-06-07T23:46:00.000-04:00

A good old-fashioned protest song, from a recent Garage Band find.

Ralph Buckley, Where Did Everybody Go

E-BOOK: Tales of Giants from Brazil

2007-06-05T21:52:00.000-04:00

I know nothing at all about this book except that I saw it in the new releases page of Manybooks, and swooned at the title. Who can resist? According to the blurb, everything in Brazil is giant. Especially the giants. And the stories about the giants, which are, of course, giant. Or, 68 pages, as the case may be. But still, admit it: when you think about Brazil, isn't the first word that pops to mind 'giants'? I didn't think so, but the author makes it sound so obvious, doesn't she?

Tales of Giants from Brazil

MUSIC: Songs by Peter Fox Simon

2007-05-31T07:29:00.001-04:00

Found this album on a little netlabel and have been enjoying taking it for a spin. It's indie-rock type stuff. Enjoy!

Peter Fox Simon, I Wish

AUDIO: Story by H.P. Lovecraft

2007-05-27T00:34:00.000-04:00

Matthew Rasmussen sent me a link to his Commons-licensed podcast of H.P. Lovecraft's short story "The Music of Erich Zann." It clocks it at just under 20 minutes. Thanks, Matthew! More on the story:

Wikipedia entry on "The Music of Erich Zann"
Wikipedia entry on H.P. Lovecraft
Librivox version of this same story

AUDIO: Panel Discussion from Cory Doctorow

2007-05-21T12:06:00.000-04:00

(via boingboing)

Cory Doctorow says:

On April 28, I did a panel at the LA Times Festival of Books with Kage Baker, John Scalzi and Harry Turtledove, called “Science Fiction: The Road From Here to There.” The LA Times just provided us with the audio for this panel on CD and I’ve secured the permission of my co-panelists to rip the disc and put the audio up on the Internet Archive as an MP3, licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. Enjoy!

MP3 Link

MISC: Free Media cd

2007-05-15T22:55:00.000-04:00

This site has a whole collection of free media stuff available for download onto a cd or dvd. Contents include the Ubuntu Linux operating system, a variety of movies and music mixes, Project Gutenberg pics, Flickr photos and a few other goodies. The whole collection features open source or Commons-licensed items. Enjoy!

E-BOOK: The Dark House by I.A.R. Wylie

2007-05-12T17:21:00.000-04:00

I found The Dark House on my favourite e-book site earlier this week, and have been zipping through it ever since. It's a somewhat gloomy but well-written coming-of-age story about an orphan-type trying to make his way in the world, and while this may be ground that has been trod upon before, this obscure addition to the genre makes for a quick and satisfying read. I have not been able to dig up too much information on its author, Ida Alexa Ross Wylie, other than that she was Australian and worked as a journalist. This seems to be one of those 'obscure works rescued from the dust-piles of history by the internet' type of books :)

MUSIC: New EP from No, Really

2007-05-07T21:57:00.000-04:00

I previously blogged about this group, whom I found on Jamendo. They have a new three-song demo EP out which is very good. Pop-ish indie folk-ish...good stuff. It's called Acoustic Demo and is of course available on Jamendo under a Creative Commons license.

E-BOOK: A House-boat on the River Styx by John Kendrick Bangs

2007-05-03T07:13:00.000-04:00

I had never, ever heard of this guy until his book popped up on the recommendations list at one of my favourite e-book sites, but apparently A House-boat on the River Styx is actually the first in what was apparently a popular series. At any rate, it was one of the funniest e-books I have come across in some time. Basically, the premise is this: Charon, the ferryman on the River Styx (aka the afterlife) is startled out of his soul-ferrying routine one day when a houseboat appears on the river. Competition! Or, not, as it turns out: the boat is a sort of floating gentlemen's club for dead people, and its executive (led by an affable Sir Walter Raleigh, Cassius, Confucius and others) wants to hire Charon to be their...janitor. Seriously. What follows are a series of farcical escapades with premises such as "Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson and Nero play pool" and "George Washington has a birthday dinner with Baron Munchausen, Doctor Johnson, Confucius, Napoleon Bonaparte, Diogenes, and Ptolemy."

The book is decidedly on the hammy side. Charon's initial reaction to the boat is "well, blow me for a landlubber if I like that!" for example. And I might have liked it better if the newcomers really did plan to compete with Charon and generate a little intrigue. But, lack of plot aside, I give this guy credit for his absurd but creative idea. Charon as the janitor on a boat full of famous dead people? Heh. I mean, really!

MUSIC: The Country Mix

2007-05-01T22:09:00.000-04:00

Time for another mixtape! Enjoy these Commons Country-esque Hits :)

Tom Paul, If Only It Would Stop Raining
Shannon Campbell, Your Own Dot Org
Amy Martin, Raven's Wings
Deborah Dalton, Brother's Keeper
Community Music Project, Muscadine
Natalie Brown, I Wonder
Ross Rainey, A Friend's Song
Mercy Machine, Bastard
Jenny Gillespie, Grenadine

E-BOOK: Wikibooks Language Courses

2007-04-27T23:12:00.000-04:00

Sorry for the radio silence this week. I got in over my head a little with work stuff. I am working on a more balanced schedule, especially as I am starting a course next week, and will be posting regularly again. Anyway, today's link is Wikibooks, a neat website which uses the 'wiki' model of user-edited content to organize information into books. Most of the books contain liberal links to related content on Wikipedia and elsewhere as well.

As I will be starting a course next week which will license me to teach French, I have been brushing up on all things French using every resource I can find. Among the texts I looked at was the Wikipedia French Language Course. Much of it was a little basic for my needs, and I can be picky about format for stuff like this, but I certainly respect this project for its ambition and its open source model.

Numerous other language programs are available through Wikibooks. Some are more comprehensive than others, but most contain at least enough to give a broad overview and some helpful links for further study.

E-BOOK: The Second Commons Press Title

2007-04-21T12:41:00.000-04:00

The first Commons Press title, The Lunchbox Gourmet, had over 600 views since its very recent launch. So, I thought it would be fun to do a follow-up. The new one is short, sweet and all-graphical: pictures, with brief comments, of my top twenty-five lunchbox bento creations. Bon appetit! It's Lunchbox Gourmet, Volume 2.

E-BOOK: The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells

2007-04-16T21:10:00.000-04:00

I got a new (used) pda this week for reading ebooks, and it's made things so much more fun :) It's the same model as my old one, but not broken, so I can actually navigate using the touchscreen. Anyway, to celebrate, I downloaded a whck of new e-books, and my first read has been "The Invisible Man" by H.G. Wells. I'm loving it! It's a fast read, with snappy and digestible language. I don't quite sympathize with our main character (the titular man is kind of a whiny brat) but I'm enjoying the story. Ceck it our for yourself!

E-text of The Invisible Man
Librivox audiobook of The Invisible Man
Wikipedia entry about The Invisible Man
Wikipedia entry about author H.G. Wells

WEBSITE: How to Enjoy Many Books

2007-04-13T13:52:00.000-04:00

In the spirit of my previous post about Wikipedia browsing, here are some tips for getting the most out of another website I love: Many Books Net. This website features more than 15,000 ebooks, most from the Project Gutenberg catalogue, available in a variety of formats. It is not my only e-book stop: with Project Gutenberg boasting 20,000 plus titles, and Project Gutenberg of Australia bumping the total catalogue up even more, there are times I do go elsewhere. But Many Books has some nice features not found in these other sites, the best of which is a menu for each title which lets you choose your download format (palmdoc, PDF and others) or read directly on-line. The title's page also sometimes (but not always) has a short excerpt and summary.

What really makes Many Books fun are the browse features, though. Here is a rundown of the best of it:

The homepage spotlights two or three books of the month
There is the always-handy tally of new additions and popular titles
Special collections such as grouped periodicals or Christmas stories are fun reads
Books in a Series is handy for when you want to read series books in the right order
The complete library is browseable by author or title
Keyword tags sort the books into easy to browse categories
There is quick access to a list of books which have been recently reviewed on the site
Consult the lists of reader suggestions, or submit your own
The somewhat buried advanced search lets you filter your results by language or category
Or, you can just read a random book from the library

I like Project Gutenberg for its simple, plain-text files readable by any machine. But when I just want to browse, or when I know I will be downlaoding directly to read on my Palm device, I much prefer going to Many Books Net.

WEBSITE: How to Enjoy Wikipedia

2007-04-10T20:24:00.000-04:00

Wikipedia is, as most people know, an internet-based community-driven encyclopedia. It has attracted its share of controversy in the past for being editable by anyone, but imho this is a specious argument. At least one study has found it to be at least as accurate as Britannica, for one thing. And any researcher who accepts information from just one source without verifying it elsewhere is not doing a very good job :) Wikipedia can be a wonderful starting point, and give a solid overview on key areas of a topic. It's a good quick read when you just want an overview.

Wikipedia also has some fun browsing features, for those who decide they just want to learn about stuff :) Herewith, the highlights:

The Featured Content page allows you to browse different types of content, and offers a random example every time you visit. So, each refresh will give you one of these:

An article
A portal
A sound
A list
A topic

The random article feature is cool int heory, except that a few times when I tried it, I got really short or incomplete articles. If you were visiting Wikipedia once a day hoping to read a short article and learn something, the homepage 'article of the day' would be your best bet.

MUSIC: Songs by engeo

2007-04-09T03:02:00.000-04:00

I am always so delighted when I find English music on Jamendo! I like French pop when I'm in the mood, but it frustrates me that they have not got a language filter on there yet. The new spiral feature has really helped me go exploring though, and I have a ton of new music to share with you over the next little while. First up: this album by engeo. "Dreamworld" is my favourite track, but all of them are good. Happy listening!

E-BOOK: Project Gutenberg Finds for French Students

2007-04-07T00:47:00.000-04:00

I am plugging away at my French, trying to attain my goal of complete bilingualism :) I have found the e-text offerings a little bit limited, to my surprise. Most of the French classics are available (Project Gutenberg has over 1000 French titles) but classic literary French and modern conversational French are not the same thing. I suppose I was hoping to find a French equivalent to the 'words of one syllable' series of retold English classics. No dice :)

I scoured the Project Gutenberg French offerings and did find a few readable texts. Most of these I would say would be quite accessible to those at the intermediate level. I am a fairly high intermediate and could work through most of this with no dictionary required :) Many of them are aimed at children. Others have stories or sections in short enough chunks that a non-French reader should be able to set up a fairly painless schedule for daily reading.

Légendes Pour les Enfants by Anonymous
Contes à Mes Petits Amies by Jean Nicolas Bouilly
Contes et Historiettes à l'usage des Jeunes Enfants by Zulma Carraud
Fables de La Fontaine by Jean de La Fontaine
Etudes sur la Littérature Française au XIXe siècle by Alexandre Vinet

AUDIO BOOK: Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter

2007-04-06T14:18:00.000-04:00

As I have blogged previously, 'Pollyanna' by Eleanor H. Porter is one of my favourite children's classics. I was delighted to find that Librivox has just released it as an audiobook. Mary Anderson reads the whole thing herself (I always prefer the solo projects on Librivox to the group efforts) and is a serviceable, unobtrusive narrator. The Librivox entry also has links to the e-text and to related Wikipedia content, so I won't bother linking to it again :)

In other news from Librivox, they released 70 new titles during their 'March Madness' event, and have a new searchable catalogue which lets you filter the catalogue by title, author or status. If you want to filter in other ways (such as by genre, reader, language or only solo/only group readings, you can do that too, but you'll need to click through to the advanced search page for that). Kudos to Librivox for the improvements. They remain one of the most prolific, consistent providers of free audiobooks and public domain audio content on the net. Thanks for the new stuff, you guys! Now, the book:

Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter

E-BOOK: Illustrated History of Scientology

2007-04-04T22:38:00.000-04:00

How to categorize this one? :) This public domain graphic novel-style piece is burning up the hit lists at Scribd, my new favourite web community with potential (you may recall, I just put up my own ebook there!) This piece presents a short, humorous explanation for all those who read the tabloids and have no idea what Tom Cruise keeps going on about :) Don't worry, it won't try to convert you :) This is strictly tongue in cheek.

MUSIC: Songs by Jenny Gillespie

2007-04-04T00:03:00.000-04:00

I found this EP, called 'Love and Ammunition' by Jenny Gillespie, on the Internet Archive. 'Bradforton' and 'Grenadine' are by far the standout tracks, but I enjoyed the whole thing. She has a sweet voice, and nicely written lyrics. From 'Grenadine' for example:

'I know it's only just a routine tear
But it looks so red in a glass that's clear...'

Enjoy! I've had this on replay for a few days now...

ADMIN: Tags!

2007-04-03T10:20:00.000-04:00

I am on vacation this week for Passover, and catching up on a whole bunch of chores. I need to start hustling on school jobs for September (sigh) but am taking the first two days just to decompress and attend family functions. So...I went through the blog yesterday and tagged all the posts! Tags should help you search better for posts which may interest you. For example, all music posts have the tag 'music'but they also have other related tags. Netlabel posts all will say 'netlabel' and will also indicate which netlabel. So, you can search for 'all netlabel music' or you can narrow it down to just Magnatune, or Jamendo or whatever. You can search for all audio, or narrow it down to just audiobooks, or just audiobooks from Librivox, or audio which is not audiobooks. All sorts of options! I have also updated the website, adding the March posts to the blog index, and adding the music posted in March to the music index, which is now at 122 songs.

WEBSITE: Jamendo has New Features!

2007-04-02T12:50:00.000-04:00

Jamendo is a wondeful netlabel that has several thousand albums available for listenign and dowloading. It allows you to star and rate albums, use the bittorrent client of your choice to download, and get recommendations based on albums you have liked in the past. It has a few quirks, to be sure: the majority of the albums are in French, which may or may not be your thing; many find downloading via bittorrent to be positively glacial (although you can export the streaming playlist to your favoured M3U player and save the tracks manually if you so desire) and it can be a fiddly site to navigate at times. That's why I was so happy to see a new feature ont he Jamendo site the other day: the spiral.

The spiral has a centre spoke with arms shooting out of it saying things like 'latest releases' or 'random' or 'popular this week.' Each arm has a row of album covers on it. Click on any album cover which catches your eye, and it gets moved to the centre spoke, where you can listen to it, download it, star it or banish it (temporarily or forever) from appearing in the spiral again. It's a great way to find new albums if you don't feel like just diving in to a massive pool of two thousand of them :) They plan to add filtering options down the road, which will be even better.

The spiral has revived my interest in Jamendo. I will be playing around with it in the next few days and rooting out some good music to recommend to you guys :)

MUSIC: A Nice Instrumental Piece

2007-03-28T21:46:00.000-04:00

Here is a nice piano piece for you to enjoy:

W J Kingston, Rippling Along

ADMIN: Announcing Debut of Commons Press

2007-03-26T00:43:00.000-04:00

This is the big project that has kept me silent all week :) I started my own tiny little e-press. I wanted to give something back to the Creative Commons community after becoming such an avid consumer, and I wanted to have a place to allow other quality authors to share their work. If you have something you want me to consider adding to my index (with a resultant pimp on this blog, of course) just publish it at Scribd or the Internet Archive under a Creative Commons license, and if I like it, I will add it to my Commons Press index here.

As for my first title, it's a cookbook/idea book called The Lunchbox Gourmet. I have become more and more creative with my packed lunches ever since food allergies made buying food on the go more difficult. I have amassed a large collection of quick and easy, allergy-friendly, mostly vegetarian sandwich/wrap ideas, freezeable treats ready to go with minimal prep work, quick to assemble pack and go items, snacks, side dishes, thermos recipes and canned soup substititutes. At Scribd, you can download it in a variety of formats, order a printed copy or read it on-line. And share the link! It is commons-licensed and wants to be free.

OTHER: Interactive Jewish Calendar

2007-03-25T07:41:00.000-04:00

Call this a cross between a software rec and a website rec :) This interactive Jewish calendar is a browser-based appelet that lets you view the Jewish holidays for a given month. You can also view candle lighting times and weekly parsha titles.

WEBSITE: Scribd Documents Community

2007-03-24T14:23:00.000-04:00

Scribd is a new-ish web community marketing itself as a YouTube for readers. Users can register for a free account and upload any document. Viewers can read it in the browser itself, download it in a variety of formats, export it as an mp3, rate, review or save to favourites. Some but not all of the documents are available under a Creative Commons license. For example, this story by Cory Doctorow. I did some experimenting and tried the MP3 save. It produced a clean file, but the robot woman was a little stilted and mechanical. The feature is a cool idea, though, and I look forward to seeing how it develops. I also like that all documents get a link to a print-on-demand service embedded in as part of the formatting. The authors get $1 if you order a printed copy.

MUSIC: Another Fun Instrumental Tune

2007-03-19T07:01:00.000-04:00

Found this one via Black Sweater, White Cat.

Alet Meier and her Pupils, Fon Der Choope

MISC: yBook Ebook Reader

2007-03-15T07:26:00.000-04:00

This is my first software post to this blog, but it's such a perfect download for avid e-book readers that I couldn't resist! yBook is a freeware e-reader program from "Spacejock Software" which has a few interesting features, It can display more than one page at a time to better simulate the feel of a paper book, for example. And it has integration with Project Gutenberg: you can download the entire Gutengerg catalogue, browse it, search it and load any title into the program with one click. Handy! View screenshots here or fo straight to the download. Thanks to Lifehacker for clueing me in to this one.

MUSIC: The Lovely Festival Companion

2007-03-14T21:13:00.000-04:00

Black Sweater, White Cat has been posting a Commons song a day, and while their tastes tend to run a littl etehcno for me, I have been keeping en eye on them for the occasional tip. One of their most recent finds, the Lovely Festival Companion, is a compilation album to promote what appears to be some sort of Belgian rock festival. The tracks are all generally solid efforts, but a few to me were especially standout:

Frank Shinobi, Captain Fiasco (rock)
Matt Elliot, Our Weight in Oil (acoustic)

E-BOOK: Stories by Peter Watts

2007-03-11T23:44:00.000-04:00

Sci-fi authorPeter Watts has made his entore backlist available on-line for free under a Creative Commons license. The short stories are regrettably only available as PDF files, but the novels can be read on-line or downloaded ad PDF or zipped HTML. I am reading Blindsight right now, and so far, so good. I will be keeping on eye on this guy!

WEBSITE: Wikibooks Open-Source Textbooks

2007-03-08T07:21:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the quiet this week. I'm back, I promise! My link for today is Wikibooks, a Wikipedia-based collection of nearly 25,000 open-source textbooks which can be both browsed and edited by visitors. You can search by category, Dewey decimal number, Library of Congress number or alphabetically. I browsed the cookbook section, and its small but growing collection of recipes of a variety of types was supplemented by links to Wikipedia entries on cooking techniques, nutrition topics and more.

ADMIN: Index of Old Posts

2007-03-04T21:34:00.000-05:00

I set up a page on the website to index all the old blog posts. Figured it was a bit more accessible than the old monthly round-ups :) Get it here.

MUSIC: A Recent Jamendo Find

2007-02-27T07:16:00.000-05:00

"Thousand Yard Stare" by No, Really describes itself as "Electric Folk" and I am not really sure what that means, but the first track, which is in my opinion the standout, was sort of folk rock twangish, and the rest of it was pretty generic girl singer/songwriter stuff. Floodplain is the opening title. It is really worth a download, and I will be keeping on eye on Jamendo to see if this group comes up with anything else.

By the way, here is a quick Jamendo tip if you find Bittorrent as painfully slow as I do and if you are not a freak about having the slightly lower resolution files. The Jamendo player has an "export to M3U" link on it, and if you click that, it will send the whole thing to Windows Media Player, or whatever your default M3U client is. From there, you can do a "save as" on individual tracks and get the whole song downloaded easily.

AUDIO: Lectures by Cory Doctorow

2007-02-26T07:09:00.000-05:00

The popular Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing and other pursuits has been teaching a course at USC called "Pwned: is everyone on campus a copyright criminal?" The first four lectures are up at Internet Archive under a Creative Commons license, here. Cory has done a lot to promore Creative Commons and public domain issues. He also has some novels and other works available on-line for free download. His thoughts on these topics are generally worth hearing, and I will be downloading his lectures at once.

MISC: The Over-Note

2007-02-24T11:45:00.000-05:00

This is kind of a new one: a Commons-licensed printer template. What this guy has done is create a template he uses to print a series of icons onto sheets of post-it notes. Then when he writes a note, he colours over all the icons that do NOT pertain to his note, and the result is an attractive visual cue as to what the note is about. You can see it in action and download the templates here.

E-BOOK: Anne of Green Gables Series

2007-02-21T07:51:00.000-05:00

Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery is one of those beloved children's classics so many people have treasured. The story concerns Anne Shirley, an orphan who is brought to the turn of the century Canadian village of Avonlea by mistake (the Cuthberts wanted a boy to help on the farm) and charms her way into staying there. It is beloved equally by children and adults. Most of the titles are available at Project Gutenberg's main site; a few are only available through Project Gutenberg of Australia :) Here they are, collected all in one place for you, in the correct reading order. Enjoy!

MUSIC: Music by Bullette

2007-02-19T11:39:00.000-05:00

Bullette is a pop-ish band with a fun, up sound. They have full albums, lyrics and the works on their very nicely designed website. Some of my favourite songs from there include:

AUDIO BOOK: Classic Fairy Tales, Part 3

2007-02-15T21:08:00.000-05:00

In Part 1 of my little series on classic fairy tales, I posted about some collections which comprise the canon most people are familiar with as far as fairy tales are concerned. In Part 2, I branched out to collections from other countries and cultures of the world. Now, in part 3, I round up some freebie audio versions :) Loudlit.com and Librovix.org were my two main sourses, with a superbly produced collection of Japanese fairy tales from the fine people at Thought Audio. Enjoy!

1) Stories by the Grimm Brothers

2) Stories by Hans Christian Andersen

3) Collections or Anthologies

E-BOOK: Classic Fairy Tales, Part 2

2007-02-12T20:40:00.000-05:00

I previously blogged about some classic fairy tale collections in the Anderson/Grimm tradition most people think of when they think of fairy tales. In this post, I cover collections which showcase fairy stories from other traditions. I think short fiction is ideal for reading in e-book form, and this set of links should keep you busy for awhile :)

E-BOOK: Classic Fairy Tales, Part 1

2007-02-09T20:39:00.000-05:00

Project Gutenberg has a large collection of fairy tales, ranging from the collected works of Hans Christian Anderson and the Grimm Brothers to the more esoteric. A good starting point is the series by Scottish "man of Letters" Andrew Lang, who collected fairy tales from around the world and published them in a series of classic collections:

In Part 2 of this series, coming this weekend, I will post about fairy tale anthologies from many countries. In Part 3, I will look at audio versions.

E-BOOK: The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran

2007-02-06T07:28:00.000-05:00

Kahlil Gibran was a Lebanese-American writer whose most famous work, The Prophet, is well-known among artists, philosophers and spiritualists. It is a series of small poetic essays on matters of faith and belief. A quick read for most people :) The book is public domain in any of the "lifetime of the author plus 50 years" countries (e.g. the British Commonwealth) and can be downloaded at Project Gutenberg of Australia.

MUSIC: Another Fiddle Tune

2007-02-03T22:53:00.000-05:00

Wow, I am on a roll with these. I have plundered all my usual sources, and this is the last of them for the time being.

Ragtime Larry and Tom Joad, Larry O’Gaff (fiddle)

MUSIC: More from Dongas Tribe

2007-01-31T20:55:00.000-05:00

The already-blogged-about group Dongas Tribe has several albums worth of material available on the Internet Archive. The tunes themselves are, in my opinon, universally excellent: spirited, rockin' folkish fiddle tunes, for the most part. But these are field recordings, so the quality varies. The best set by far is Rainy Night in the Bell Tent. My top three tunes:

Dongas Tribe, Welsh Pipe Tune
Dongas Tribe, Man in the Brown Hat
Dongas Tribe, Buttermilk Mary

E-BOOK: The O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories

2007-01-29T20:00:00.000-05:00

My recent posts on short story collections by single authors and multiple authors proved extremely popular. You can expect more posts on short fiction anthologies in the coming while. I think they are quite suited to e-book reading because it's not quite as intimidating as Dickens or Austen: you can read it in chunks and get through a whole story quickly.

One of the forerunners to today's myriad and popular "Best Stories of Year Whatever" collections was the O. Henry Prize, which has endured to our time. The first three years worth of annual anthologies are public domain material available at Project Gutenberg.

MUSIC: Instrumental Tunes by Harmsichord

2007-01-27T10:15:00.000-05:00

Found this one via Black Sweater, White Cat, who has taken up the 'song a day' mantle from CC 365. I am a picky instrumental listener; I admit to my pop-ish tastes, and unless it's Celtic instrumental or something with a strong beat, I often get bored. But BSWC has found a composer who piqued my interest. What they seem to be doing is combining standard musical styles with interesting instruments:

Zigong Blues is a blues tune with Chinese instruments
High Space Drifter mixes percussion sounds with trumpet stuff
Beagle B is kind of jazzy percussion stuff with flute

There are a dozen others available on the Internet Archive. Enjoy!

AUDIO: 15+ Complete Language Courses

2007-01-23T20:49:00.000-05:00

I was just stunned when I found this resource, it's that fabulous. The Foreign Service Institute, is a branch of the United States Government which exists to provide cultural and language-related training to government personnel about to be deployed overseas. A website has made available complete copies of their earlier courses, which are public domain material. I only looked in detail at the French one because I am involved in French study now for work purposes, and it had a PDF textbook over 300 pages long, and several dozen lengthy audio lessons in MP3 format, all free for the downloading. I am not sure how useful a PDF-format book will be to me, and I think I have most of that material in other forms, but I will be downloading the audio classes. And there are plenty of other languages available too: Hebrew, German, Greek, Korean, Mandarin, Spanish and more. Check it out here.

ADMIN: A Quick Reader Survey

2007-01-22T18:54:00.000-05:00

I'm getting myself organized for the new year :) If you could post a brief comment answering the following questions, that would be great:

1) Would you be interested in seeing posts about items not in the public domain or under Creative Commons license, but freely available on-line just the same?

2) Would you like to see posts about video? About book readers, MP3 player, gadgets or anything of that sort?

3) Would you prefer to see more editorializing/commentating from me about each post, or do you enjoy the more bare-bones 'just the links' style I have used so far?

4) Do you like the somewhat random post-as-I-find-stuff approach, or would you prefer theme days, e.g. an audio book every Monday, a song every Tuesday etc.

Thanks! I want to try and get the word out there about this blog more, so I want it to be the best it can be. I would so appreciate your brief feedback, either via comment or via email.

MEDIA: The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot

2007-01-22T18:49:00.000-05:00

T.S. Eliot is one of my only favourite modern poets. The Waste Land is one of his best-known works. Thought Audio has produced a very high-quality audio of this famous poem, and for those that prefer to read for themselves, the text is in the public domain and available at Project Gutenberg.

Audio version via Thought Audio
E-book version in various formats

MUSIC: Celtic-Inspired Mix

2007-01-20T11:12:00.000-05:00

Another 'mix tape' post, this one featuring Celtic-style music for your enjoyment. As I have said before, I find this sort of music great for working out. It's also fun for just listening. Nearly all of these have not been blogged here yet :)

Avel Glas, Orage
James Curran, The Computer Virus
Da Camera, The Irish Ground
Dongas Tribe, The Lark in the Morning
Paul Epstein, Skippin' Cat/Catharsis
Fromseier Rose, Proptraekker Set
Shira Kammen, Christmas Day in the Morning
Minstrel Spirit, The Drunken Jester
Green Man, The Shiny Penny
Shake that Little Foot, Bonaparte Crossing the Rhine

MUSIC: Another Song from Magnatune

2007-01-17T07:23:00.000-05:00

Magnatune has a new embedded player where one can preview the songs without launching their media player. I have been having so much fun with it! Here is a great song I found in my travels.

Myles Cochrane, The Hardest Part

AUDIO: Podcast on Technology and Copyright

2007-01-14T07:58:00.000-05:00

As mentioned on Boing Boing, the EFF is back with another podcast. In this installment, they talk to activist Derek Slater about the latest gadgets, and how they are being affected by the current talk on copyright reform. As some of you might have gathered, this is an issue I feel very deeply about, and it's one of the reasons I have become more interested in open source, public domain and Creative Commons material---material whose creators seem to have a more realistic idea of how media should be, can be, and is used. I could soapbox on this forever, but I'll spare you :) You can check out the podcast instead.

MUSIC: The Workout Mix

2007-01-13T10:57:00.000-05:00

Someone on my fitness board was asking for good music to take to the gym. I know I have lamented before that so many of the Commons stuff is of the techno or R&B persuasion while my own tastes veer to the pop-ish, but as you know, that sort of stuff IS out there, one just has to dig a little :) So I put myself to the test and tried to put together a playlist for workouts. Here they are, ten songs with a good beat and catchy tune.

Minstrel Spirit, Winds are Crying
Community Music Project, Tammakhtaar
Ross Rainey, I Was Wrong
Suzy Y Los Quattro, Make my Day
Brad Sucks, Making Me Nervous
Jonathan Coulton, Chiron Beta Prime
Joshua Morin, Stay Away from Me
Deshead, I Meant to Remember
The Happy Planets, Back 2019
Andy Sullivan, I Can't Hold it Down

E-BOOK: Short Story Collections,Part 2

2007-01-10T07:39:00.000-05:00

Here are some short story collections by individual authors. Many of them have more available (especially Dickens, Doyle and Chekhov). I just picked one as a sampling. Most of them also have novels, tales, sketches or collected works available too, so if you do find an author you like, there is likely more where that came from. One of the great things about the short story as a genre is its ability to introduce one to new writers. You can sample many authors in a short time this way :)

Droll Stories from the Abbeys of Touraine, Honore de Balzac
Four Weird Tales, Algernon Blackwood
The Chorus Girl & Other Stories, Anton Chekhov
The Awakening & Other Stories, Kate Chopin
Three Ghost Stories, Charles Dickens
Tales of the Jazz Age, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Golden Slipper & Other Problems, Anna Katherine Green
Cape Cod Stories, Joseph Crosby Lincoln
A Collection of Stories, Jack London
Nine Short Stories, Rex Stout
A Desperate Character & Other Stories, Ivan S. Tugenev
The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Vol, 1
Twelve Stories and a Dream, H.G. Wells
The Happy Prince & Other Tales, Oscar Wilde
Death at the Excelsior & Other Stories, P.G. Wodehouse

E-BOOK: Short Story Collections, Part 1

2007-01-08T20:15:00.000-05:00

Many short story collections are available in the public domain for fans of the genre. There anthologies by single authors, and collections by just one author. We'll start with the 'collections by various authors' today :) Here are some collections which are based around a specific theme:

Scribner's also apparently once put out a series of anthologies by authors in different countries. These must have been quite successful, as there were quite a few of them!

Later this week, I'll share some single-author collections which you might enjoy. Remember that the ones listed here are just a sample of what's available. Feel free to go digging in your own! And apologies for the radio silence these past few days. I have been just flattened by a stomach bug that I hope is now on its way out :) I will post more later this week, I promise!

MUSIC: Magnatune Song of the Day

2007-01-03T17:39:00.000-05:00

The excellent netlabel Magnatune has started a song of the day feature. Each day, they will post one song for you to enjoy and download. You can receive a daily email, too. It doesn't look so far like they are archiving the previous days, but even so, if you have ever found their catalogue a little overwhelming and not been sure where to start---or if you are like me and can be skittish about branching into genres you are not familiar with---this could be just the thing.

MUSIC: One More from CC 365

2007-01-01T16:04:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure if the people at CC 365 will be continuing their blog into 2007, but I thank these guys for being the ones to initially get me into the whole Creative Commons movement. They didn't quite meet their goal of posting one song a day for an entire year, and the tastes of that collective were not quite on par with mine (Scott Andrew in the first week notwithstanding). But the blog was a ground-breaker, and I thought it would be appropriate to inaugerate the new year on MY blog with one of their pics. I struggle to find CC music that isn't techno/ambient/soundscape type stuff, so it a delight when a tune like this one pops up with farily little digging :)

Bobby Babby, Bobby (Nicoroloa Remix)

ROUND-UP: Posts from December

2006-12-30T13:15:00.000-05:00

Previous Round-Ups:

And now, the posts from December:

E-Books:

E-Books for Holiday Reading

Music:

Audio/Misc: